by Deborah Reed
Averlee’s resemblance to Elin was so striking that Vivvie could only bear it seconds at a time. She asked Quincy how she was feeling.
“Not good,” Averlee answered for her.
“Uh-huh,” Vivvie said. “So bad she can’t talk?”
In the silence Vivvie patted Quincy’s warm knee. “I understand you’re feeling sick.”
Quincy nodded with what looked like a loosely fitted head.
“We’ll stop at the drugstore and pick something up. How long have you been sick?” Quincy didn’t answer. “How long has she been sick, Averlee?”
“A few days.”
“Did your mother know this?”
Averlee shrugged toward the dawn racing through a grove.
Vivvie stopped at a blinking red light and felt a new rush of the sour, yellow sickness she’d been fighting since answering the phone. She swept her hand inside the bottom of her purse, then realized she’d left her last packet of antacid on the kitchen windowsill at home.
The girls watched as she dropped the purse beneath her knees.
A car honked from behind. Vivvie checked the girls as she moved through the intersection, two sets of owl eyes peering beneath white curls. Averlee brushed the hair from her sister’s damp face, held her palm against Quincy’s forehead, dropped it, and let go a small, tired sigh.
Vivvie drove on, nearly reaching the drugstore before Averlee spoke again. “We only like it with grape jelly,” she said. “And soft bread. Not the kind with crust. Quincy’s losing her baby teeth.”
It took a moment for Vivvie to realize Averlee was referring to the peanut butter.
“You see these?” Vivvie tapped a front tooth with her fingernail. “They’re fake. I don’t go for that tough crust myself.”
TWO
VIVVIE UNEXPECTEDLY VEERED SOUTH TOWARD the hospital, unable to tolerate not knowing, not seeing what kind of shape her daughter was in. Six years since Vivvie laid eyes on her, six years since getting any kind of word that she was even alive, and now every moment she’d endured had collected inside her at once.
She set her granddaughters in front of cartoons in the nearby waiting room, handed each a juice box, and told them not to move.
“Why can’t we come?” Averlee asked.
Vivvie pulled two mints from her purse. “Here. You’ll see her soon enough,” she said, and asked the nurse across the hall to keep an eye on them.
After that she stood clutching her purse near the door inside Kate’s room, unable to approach her daughter’s bed. Kate’s doll-like body was propped to a near sitting position, skeletal arms at her sides, her face rawboned and pastier than Vivvie had ever seen on a living person. Tubes streamed from her nose, mouth, and arms, others snaked from beneath the sheet, impossible to tell where each began, what was their intention, whether they were feeding something toward the beeping apparatus and clear liquid bags or funneling the life back into Kate.
A thin-haired doctor fussed with an IV on the opposite side of the bed. He was slower than Vivvie when he moved but nearly half her age.
“Good God.” Vivvie’s voice lingered, small and stupid, in the air above her head. She needed to make sense of what was happening even as she fought off the dawning that no such sense would be made. Kate’s hand twitched as if zapped by an electrical shock. “It’s not a coma, right?” Vivvie said. “The nurse out front said it wasn’t a coma.”
“No, ma’am,” the doctor said. “Just a slumber.” He didn’t meet her eyes.
The door behind her swung open, and a paunchy, red-haired nurse burst past Vivvie, her scrubs covered in miniature bears as if she’d just been retrieved from the pediatric ward. She tampered with a square, blue device near the bed, repositioned the wispy tubes in Kate’s nose, sighed, and looked around as if for another task.
Kate was a child again—arms, legs, feet small as a schoolgirl’s.
“Are you Mom?” the nurse asked, but didn’t glance in Vivvie’s direction, didn’t look up from the clipboard now in her hand.
Vivvie nodded. “Yes.”
Kate inched her head in Vivvie’s direction.
“Shh, shh, shh,” the nurse said, patting Kate’s shoulder. Kate’s lids peeled open to reveal what looked like a set of bloodshot tumors.
Vivvie backed against the wall. A moment later Kate’s eyes closed, the corner of her mouth upturned as if she were dreaming something sweet.
“They do that sometimes,” the nurse said. “She’s not conscious. Not yet.”
“How long is she going to be like this?” Vivvie asked, hearing the grope in her voice.
Kate coughed, deep and guttural.
“She’s not breathing on her own?” Vivvie asked.
The nurse fastened the tube in Kate’s throat. Kate’s eyes shot open, closed.
Vivvie stepped forward, then back, dropped her purse to the floor, held one hand to her stomach, the other to her throat while the nurse stroked the hair from Kate’s forehead.
“You just relax, Miss Katherine,” she said. “Lie still.”
But Kate appeared agitated, her throat jerking upward, a gurgling repetition of something that sounded an awful lot like “Get her out.”
“They say things.” The nurse patted Kate’s arm, making it appear even smaller. “Nonsense.”
The heat in Vivvie’s face made her dizzy.
The doctor shot clear fluid into Kate’s IV. “There’s no reason she won’t make a full recovery. From the pills, I mean.” Vivvie didn’t care for his tone. He still hadn’t met her eyes, and a feeling came over her that these two were somehow blaming Vivvie for the pills. Blaming her for some awful childhood years.
“This isn’t my fault,” she said.
The doctor slid his hands into his flat white-coat pockets and peered above the rim of his glasses on his ruddy red nose. From the front he was older than his scrawny shoulders first led her to believe. “Of course not. The social worker has some information for you. She’d like to speak with you about the next steps.”
Vivvie acknowledged his words with a squint.
“It’s always good when the whole family participates in the recommended treatment,” he said.
“I am the whole family,” she said, and the crack in her voice made her madder than she already was.
For the first time since walking in she had their full attention.
“That’s fine,” the nurse said.
“Is it?” Vivvie snatched her purse from the floor.
“The recommended treatment and remedies—” the nurse began.
“Remedies? Look at her. You talk like all she needs is orange juice and exercise.”
“It’s not that,” the doctor said.
Vivvie waited for an explanation.
“Due to patient privacy laws we aren’t supposed to tell you,” the nurse said. “All I can say is she’s been in before.”
Vivvie walked out, an ancient anger burning all the way to her ears. So many years of worry, her daughter’s entire life a cause for worry, all a lead-up to this. Vivvie clamped her jaw to keep from swearing.
Her granddaughters had slumped sideways, one into the other, on the verge of sleep in front of the television.
“Come on, girls.” Vivvie clapped her hands and turned to leave. Averlee and Quincy wriggled, half-lidded, off the chairs. She never should have come straight here. They were exhausted. She was exhausted.
“Did you see Mommy?” Averlee asked.
“Oh, I saw her all right.”
“Is she okay?”
Vivvie held the doorframe, trembling so hard that passing out seemed a good possibility.
Quincy wiped her nose on the back of her hand.
“There’s nothing wrong with your mommy that a swift kick in the ass won’t fix,” Vivvie said, kneeling in front of Quincy, digging her nails into the carpet for solid ground. “I didn’t mean that. Never mind what I said.… How about you stop wiping your nose on your hand?” Vivvie found a tissue in her purse and swiped
the snot above Quincy’s lip. “Next time I want you to ask for a Kleenex.”
Quincy’s eyes were the same smoky grey as her father’s, and Vivvie made a point not to hold it against her. “You haven’t said a word since I picked you up this morning,” Vivvie said. “Are you feeling any better?”
A quick, single nod swung her curls forward.
“Say, ‘Yes. I feel better.’ ”
“Uh-huh,” Quincy said.
Vivvie stuffed the tissue in Quincy’s pocket and caught a glimpse of Averlee’s face in the hospital light. White crust wedged in the corners of her hollowed eyes, sleep-deprived, Vivvie guessed, nights stretching beyond this one here.
“What exactly happened, Averlee? I mean at home. With your mother.”
Averlee shrugged.
“How’d you find her? What was she doing?”
“I don’t know. Sitting at the table with her head down.”
“Why were you up so late?”
Averlee reached for her sister’s hand. “Getting something for Quincy’s throat.”
Vivvie paused. “Did your mother say anything strange before you went to bed?”
Averlee shook her head.
“How’s she been feeling lately? These last few months?”
“Okay.”
“Nothing out of the ordinary going on?”
“I guess not.”
“All right,” Vivvie said. “That’s fine. You don’t have to tell me now.”
Vivvie stood quickly, feeling her weight in her knees. She shook her legs out and then dug inside her purse for her cell phone. “Let’s go,” she said, already walking, glancing back to see they were following, a wispy mix of skinny legs and puffy, tired eyes, reams of wild hair like some physical reaction to all the chaos.
“Stand by the exit door over there,” Vivvie said at the entrance. “I need to make a call.”
The girls pressed their faces into the glass, hands cupping eyes like binoculars.
Before Vivvie finished dialing she realized it was the middle of the night on the West Coast. She shut the phone off and coughed into the crook of her arm, old cigarettes and stomach acid on her tongue. She popped a mint into her mouth.
The girls rolled their backs to the glass and peered up at her.
“I’m sorry about that,” Vivvie said, gesturing toward the waiting room. “What I said. I was just upset. Your mother’s going to be fine.… It upset me. That’s all.”
They eyed one another like puppets relaying messages in a play—Get us out of here. Away from this old witch.
Cool air played across the back of Vivvie’s neck. She could only imagine the things Kate had told them about her, and in her imagining she was filled with the urge to tell them about their own mother, starting with the time Kate took a pair of scissors to half the house while Vivvie hung a basket of wash outside on the line. When Vivvie came inside she stopped in the living-room doorway, confused by the sun shining through the lower half of the windows where the drapes used to hang. Her copies of Ladies’ Home Journal were glossy, sun-reflective flakes on the floor, her lopped-off shirtsleeves laid out on the coffee table between the laces of her shoes.
Vivvie shielded her eyes from the hospital lights. “Mercy me,” she said, her mother’s words from the past clamoring up inside her. All kinds of particulars needed tending to, and this put her in mind of her mother—mercy me, she’d say before clearing the dishes, mercy me, pulling weeds. Mercy me, Vivvie’s shifts at Roth’s would have to be covered. Groceries, mercy me, the right kind, things she never bought.…
And then what?
“I’ve got a porch swing,” Vivvie said, picturing the girls happy at her house, wishing the laughter and swinging into being, eating cookies with lemonade on the screened-in porch. She needed cookies and lemonade.
Averlee stared at her.
“It stands up,” Vivvie said, looping her arms into the shape of the swing. “With a frame. Not the kind that hangs from the ceiling.”
Averlee’s expression was unchanged.
“A porch swing. For swinging on,” Vivvie said.
“What else would it be for?” Averlee said.
Vivvie reached for a cigarette, her eyes never straying from Averlee’s. She stuck the cigarette between her lips, then pulled it back out.
“If you aren’t the spitting image of Elin,” she said, wiping the nervous grin off her own mouth. Come back to haunt me, she thought. Come back to punish me, once and for all.
THREE
WISTERIA OBSCURED THE GUTTER OUTSIDE Elin’s bedroom window. She swung open the pane and stuck her head out as if from a porthole. It hadn’t rained. Nothing but morning birds and sunshine—the white tip of Mount Hood visible from sixty miles away. So where had the noisy drip come from? The bathroom faucet again? Elin slammed the window so hard a screw popped free of the hinge.
“Screw you, screw,” she said.
Fluke stretched in his fleece bed at her feet. “Not yet,” Elin said, and his body tensed, waiting for her hand signal, a salute, to tell him it was time to rise. She didn’t know if all Jack Russells were this obedient, but Fluke was committed to doing things by the book.
With Rudi already in the shower, Elin couldn’t listen for the faucet. When had he gotten out of bed? She was tired, having slept little after the call from Kate at two in the morning Florida time, eleven o’clock hers. It was the first she’d heard from her sister in six years, and Kate hadn’t made much sense, her snippets of conversation strange, like someone tasked with describing family photos, her words slow and slurred, submerged in a kind of drunken nostalgia. This was new. Elin had never known Kate to drink. She’d especially never known her to wane toward sentimentality. But here was her sister, the disappearing hard-luck waitress, the brooding poet who scribbled four-letter poems in notebooks in the middle of the night, who’d thrown fists and shoes at Elin’s head, now harping on the phone, “And the ssssand castle I made that day. And our yellow and rrred bikinis. The waaaves…” Even stone-sober Kate wasn’t known for making good sense, and this was reason enough for Elin to let it go. They’d never been close. Far from it. But Elin couldn’t let it go. Her sister’s voice had wormed past the sheath of Elin’s nerves, especially when Kate started in on the time she’d nearly drowned. Elin had been the one to save her. So why this? Why now? Perhaps getting closer to midlife was hitting Kate hard, causing a panicked knee-jerk making of amends.
Not long after falling asleep Elin became trapped inside the same nightmare she’d fought off as a kid—the ocean, Kate’s deathly pale face, the nauseating smell of Coppertone. When Elin finally managed to reach another slumber in the early morning hour, the nightmare returned, and she woke kicking the blanket to free her legs of Kate’s hair, like seaweed, in the dream-ocean from which Elin gasped for breath. After that she lay awake listening to the drip, or maybe the thumping of her heart, or maybe the vein in her temple. At some point Rudi had slipped out of bed without her noticing.
Fluke sat at attention, straining for the salute so he could tear down the hallway, claws slipping and ticking the wooden stairs for his bowl in the kitchen. The anticipation built in his cocked little head, his front paws kneading the fleece. She loved this dog, his soft, small body often toted in her arms, all bright white fur except for the two perfectly brown bull’s-eye markings circling each eye. She didn’t know what to make of herself, taking pleasure in holding him back.
Steam from the shower drifted around the bathroom door across the room, and Rudi began whistling one of the many folksy German songs Elin would never learn. She saluted, said, “Breakfast,” and then cringed as Fluke knocked his hip into the doorframe on his way out of the room.
“Good morning,” Elin shouted through the bathroom door.
“What?” Rudi said.
She stuck her nose in the warm, swamp-like steam, thought again of Florida, of Kate, and steadied herself against the trim. She needed to call her mother, fill her in about Kate, even though Elin still
had no idea where Kate was—no matter how hard she’d pressed, Kate refused to answer, and the number she’d called from was blocked.
The first hint of a headache flared behind one eye. Elin considered going back to bed. “Nothing,” she said.
“What?” Rudi asked.
“I’m up,” she said. “Going to start the water for coffee. Are you having some?”
“No, thanks. I’ve got to run.”
Downstairs, Elin shuffled into the kitchen, put the kettle on, scooped the coffee into the French press, and fetched The Oregonian from the porch.
Fluke paced behind the stool where Elin sat at the counter. She hadn’t fed him, hadn’t yet let him out.
“Just a second,” she said, flipping through the paper until she found the ad she’d designed for the opening of the PDX Brewpub. A full page, and the colors all true, which wasn’t always the case. The logo appeared exactly as she’d intended. But seeing it in the paper made her question the design itself. Was the font too flat, too blocky for the venue? PDX was for hipsters with cash, a watering hole with microbrews, a place for debating banjos, bikes, raising chickens in the city. It was so Portland, with its midcentury-modern furniture and walls made of glossy Doug fir logs. The owners had signed off on the logo, had loved it, they said, but now Elin didn’t trust their instincts. That logo had a whiff of life insurance. Everything about it was wrong.
Fluke whined softly. “Oh. Right,” Elin said, but went on sitting, massaging the back of her neck.
Outside the open window the dewy coolness burned off, and another sunny, humidity-free day was on the rise. Ten years, and Elin still wasn’t used to Oregon summers, the way she could work for hours under the patio umbrella and still feel energized by day’s end. No swelling heat or mugginess weighing her down, no bloodthirsty mosquitoes droning in her ears, sucking her skin into itchy red welts. No alligators in the yard, lizards in the sink, no three o’clock thunderstorms leaving behind a thewy swell of misery. This Pacific Northwest summer of dry air and chirpy little birds and nothing in the yard but tulips and peonies and the neighbor’s affectionate tabby.